Convenience Stores Step Up Tech Game

The Age of Convenience

There is one thing I consistently find so interesting, the one thing almost every single person has on them at all times….their phone a $800 (sometimes more now) dollar piece of our lives. Which, by the way, is not just a phone anymore but a smart device that can make calls, surf the web, be your personal assistant, translate a foreign language for you, and the apps….there are multiple apps for anything you can think of. This is a device of convenience…we don’t even have to leave our house or pick up the phone to get any kind of food delivered to our house. In this age of convenience, where anything and everything is right at your fingertips retailers have since been capitalizing on that and now come the convenience stores.

Convenience Store News conducted a study focusing on technology and how it plays a role in convenience stores. They discovered that over 50% of those who participated in the study plan to add new equipment and replace old technology this year. The change is thought to be attributed to the realization that technology can bring together and help grow other aspects of a convenience store owners business. Much like a building automation systems already do for retail and restaurant locations. With the trend of food service growing in convenience stores now the food safety aspect will come into play as well.

Another notable finding from the study was the increase in new products being introduced to the customer via social media, 46 percent to be exact. The companies already using social media have their own mobile app and are using it to keep their customer base educated and engaged. According to Statista, 81% of Americans have a social media profile, over 1.96 billion people are on social media worldwide and that number is expected to grow to 2.5 billion in 2018. With that eye-popping number, it’s a given that social media marketing is a must.

Casey’s General Stores’ mobile app just surpassed 1 million downloads since it launched in January 2016. The app offers the essentials: hours of operation, location but with some awesome feathers like ordering pizza and made-to-order sub sandwiches. The success of this app just reinforces the findings from Convenience Store News, technology integration is essential for your business to thrive in this technology-driven world. It’s not just about having an app or system that integrates with your store, but an app that is useful to your customers, a system that is useful to you….an app that keeps your customers opening it daily and a system that keeps showing its worth to you and your staff daily.